Given the complex nature of the National Center’s work, its evaluation will use an emergent approach to evaluate progress, enabling us to adapt our activities to events as they unfold and providing appropriate flexibility to both guide and record the change process at all levels, from a single clinical site to a national policy discussion. A relatively recent addition to the field, developmental evaluation is a unique approach with distinct characteristics appropriate to understanding the work of the National Center.
The continuing evolution of meaningful interprofessional practice and education programs requires critical attention to systems issues that will necessarily affect their implementation at sites across the country. Creating viable and sustainable programs, including those at sites currently the farthest along, must engage multiple systems across local, state, regional, and national levels. Attending to these system details will be one of the National Center evaluation’s primary responsibilities; it is a defining feature of our work.
Developmental evaluation will allow for consistent documentation and reflective use of evaluative data as the National Center evolves and establishes future sustainability. Our expectation, grounded in years of experience with evaluation and interprofessional practice and education program implementation, is that events will shape both program and evaluation activities. We look forward to adapting our efforts in response.
National standardized research database >